Roosevelt has been seeking such aha moments since 1960, when, as a so-called landman, he roamed ahead of rigs and negotiated mineral rights. In 1973, while he was an executive vice president at Shenandoah Oil Corp., his workers dodged anti-government guerillas to build a 140-mile pipeline in Guatemala. He went on to drill for oil and gas throughout the U.S. and Canada and to start a natural gas storage company.
After searching for half a century, he says, he’s poised to launch what he says could be the world’s biggest CO2 EOR project, with 17,500 acres for drilling and 100,000 acres for permanent CO2 storage.
Roosevelt’s quest for carbon dioxide has led him to Houston-based Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP, the biggest U.S. pipeline company and the fifth-largest Texas oil producer. Kinder Morgan may supply the gas, operate his project or take an equity stake, Roosevelt says.
Tim Bradley, chief executive officer of Kinder Morgan’s CO2 unit, says his company was slow to see the potential of residual oil zones. Now that it has, Kinder Morgan is seeking joint ventures to expand into them.
The company replenished its sold-out supply by buying CO2 trapped under a granite rock dome near St. Johns, Ariz., in 2011. Kinder Morgan may build a pipeline from St. Johns to the Permian, says Bradley, who retired at the end of March.
Roosevelt says he has a contract to buy CO2 starting in 2017 from a power plant that Seattle-based Summit Power Group LLC has proposed near Odessa, Texas.
Eric Redman, Summit’s CEO, says he plans to break ground for the 400-megawatt plant in June or July. It would heat coal in a gasifier to form a chemical mix called syngas and then strip CO2 before burning the syngas in a turbine. The plant would be built near a crossroads called Penwell, where a few dozen ranchers live in the vicinity of rusted trailers and oil tanks from prior Permian booms.
If all goes well, Summit would build two or three more gasifiers to make power and products such as ammonia and plastics. Roosevelt has an option to buy the CO2 from any additional gasifiers Summit constructs.
Roosevelt is also in touch with Southern Co. and other utilities that capture CO2 after burning coal or natural gas.
North of Mobile, Alabama, Southern and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. are running the world’s biggest test for trapping carbon dioxide from power plant smokestacks. The plant can capture 500 tons a day that go to Plano, Texas-based Denbury Resources Inc. for underground storage and potential oil recovery.